Tag Archives: fairy

After many days of carefully creating fairy habitats, it was time for the big night!

In honor of the event, The Princess even read a special fairy book.Normally, we assemble the fair village outside but sadly this year the wind did NOT cooperate and were forced to set up inside in the dining room.

My awesome mushroom hut!

Cinco’s clay fairy huts lined a path leading to the golden castle and several small boxes painted with metallic colors were also displayed.

The castle also had many lovely embellishments including feathers and the famous golden fairy wings! A small bottle of fairy beads was also laid out for the visitors.

Additionally, my attempt at a milk jug fairy home was also included off to the side.

Fairy Forest Cafe (FFC as Cinco called it) had several tables and chairs set out in front of it and included a Fairy Forest Cafe sign (not pictured).

And, many lovely dishes of fairy food were set out as well. I was particularly fond of the mini-cinnamon rolls and tiny bread.

When we awoke in the morning, The Captain reported that both the front and back doors were flung open. NO JOKE! Whether it was the fairies or the wind who can say?

In true fairy style, they left a note, presents and of course fairy dust.

Both children were gifted magical glowing necklaces.

And, Cinco received a mini hot-wheels set (how perfect), as well as puzzle from the mischievous Puck. They also left behind a few wolves to inhabit the dog house that Cinco made.

The Princess was given a cute fairy wand and a paint your own fairy statue. I was forgotten yet again by the fairies. But then, I suppose those over 21 don’t get magical prizes.

The summer solstice tradition lives on. We ate strawberry shortcake for dinner, played with sparklers and glow sticks and the kiddos built their fairy houses again! The Princess also discovered a new book series which features lots of fairies including one that shares The Princess’ name. To top it off we watched Epic which takes place on the Summer Solstice, but doesn’t actually involve fairies.

This year Cinco decided on a baseball theme for his fairy creation. He started with a ball field complete with dugouts and even Gatorade ads on the stadium walls, LOL.

The following day he built a score board out of craft sticks. Next, we made mini baseball caps together. We made two sets of 9 caps each, enough to field two fairy teams. Cinco and I like the blue cap best because they remind us of the KC Royals.

I have left instructions on how to make your own cap at the end of the blog. Scroll down…

He made mini baseballs out of wooden balls from the craft store and created a makeshift baseball bat. Cinco wants to go so far as to make t-shirts for the fairies, but there was only so much time in the day…. Get that? The longest day…. only so much time. What a laugh.

Cinco also needed a fairy house.This year the kids wanted to go with more of a nature theme and he decided to create a cave for the fairies. He covered the entire outside of the cave with stones.
Cinco made a bed from straw and craft sticks as well.

The Princess decide on a glamorous dress shop for the fairies. We made mini dresses with wine corks as the mannequins. The Princess also added a special fashion mirror for the fairies to try on their dresses. She also added a pink scarf and some perfume bottles for the fairies. She really glammed up the dress shop and then went with more of a nature theme for the fairy house.

The house was lovingly created from an old Go-gurt box. Rocks and shells added to the nature theme. The fairies also have an outdoor picnic area complete with mushrooms for stools.

Per usual the kids did a great job and the fairies left a few magical items. The Princess received a magical necklace and Cinco got a sports inspired quidditch necklace . (If you can believe it, his necklace cost less than $2, including shipping!!!)

The fairies also have an extra special treat this year. Normally, they spread ice cream sprinkles all over their mini houses. Of course, they did that again. But they also left milk chocolate sprinkles for the kiddos, . These are sprinkles commonly eaten in Holland, and were inspired by our trip this summer to see The Dutchman. I haven’t had these since I was in grade school… and personally, I am looking forward to eating them as well.

To make your own mini baseball cap you will need:

bottle caps

pom poms

duct tape in the color of your choice

thin cardboard or cardstock

a glue gun

Start by cutting out a bill for your cap. Hot glue it to the bottle cap.Glue a medium pom-pom to the top of the bottle cap. Then carefully cover your hat in duck tape taking care not to tape down the pom-pom too much or you baseball cap will look more like a civil war officer’s hat.

You may have figured out by now, that when we travel I wait until we get home to actually blog about it. This sometimes means that the Mom Camp blog gets off schedule compared to actual Mom Camp activities. In this case, I was forced to interrupt the vacation blog to bring you Mom Camp Summer Solstice.

If you follow the blog, you know that EVERY YEAR for the Summer Solstice we build fairy houses. We set them up outside in the backyard and leave them for the fairies to enjoy during their midsummer revels. They often have such wild parties that they leave the area littered with fairy dust and sprinkles. In return, the fairies kindly leave a little a trinket and sometimes a note for the kids.

There was even a year when I doctored some photos and pretended that I got footage of the fairies in the middle of the night when they were at the fairy houses.

Below you can see the best examples of our work from the last three years. As you can tell, we use a LOT of recycled materials. Our primary item is cardboard. But we throw in plastic bottles, cloth, and anything else we can use. The fairy bow and arrow quiver is an old sharpie pen top!

Mom Camp is only 7 days in and the kids have turned in to demanding little stinkers. Before I could even grab a cup coffee this morning, Cinco was asking what craft, project or experiment was next. Oh heaven kids, give mamma a chance to at least get the sleep out of her eyes. I will say in Cinco’s defense, he let me sleep until 7am…. Fairies, Sun and Shakespeare keep rolling. We added the finishing touches to the fairy house in preparation for tomorrow night when we plan to catch the fairies! The bow and arrow is finished! We got the idea from twelve gadgets. Although, we added a few modifications. You basically take a popsicle stick and make two notches near the top and two near the bottom. Then soak the stick in water to soften it up for an hour — (you can cut down the time if you put it in a bowl of water in the microwave for a minute. The hot water will help it become pliable faster. Let it soak about 15 minutes in the hot water and you should be ready to go.) Then you shape it into a crescent and string some dental floss around the two ends at the notches you made. I glue gunned some ribbon to our bow so that it would reinforce the shape of the popsicle stick and prevent any splinters from the stick getting into someone’s finger! We also used an old Sharpie pen cap for a quiver. We glued some string to the cap, added a little glitter at the bottom for decoration and placed our q-tip arrows in it.

We also completed our treasure chest for the throne room. It was just a simple, free printable from reading-with-kids.com. We did add a few pirate coins and some plastic ice-cube gems we bought at Target.

Next up, we made flower fairies with items I bought from the Dollar Store and of course, my handy glue gun! Our supplies were some styrofoam balls, cheap fake flowers, glitter, q-tips, string, markers and feathers. Simple easy fun for a 4 and 7 year old! Additionally, once the fairies were done the kids spent about an hour playing with them! At least this gave me bit of time to do some laundry.

Sun projects continued with sun paper pictures. You can get the paper on Amazon for about $6. I buy this one even though its sold as a “re-fill” pack. It comes with everything you need and why pay more afull kit that really isn’t that much better? Basically you find some objects (natural or otherwise) and place them on the paper in the sunlight. After a few minutes you remove the objects and wash off the paper. You will see the images of your objects appear. We did several in the morning. We even placed a feather on the paper. At first, the feather did not show up on the page and Cinco was pretty disappointed. About ten minutes later a few wisps of an image started to materialize and he loved watching it “appear” on the sun paper. Oddly enough, some of the “blue” washed off on my leg and despite a scrubbing it hasn’t come off…hmmmmmm…

For books, we continued our Midsummer Night’sDream for kids. They really loved that one of the character’s is named Nick Bottom. I tried to make the connection for them that Bottom was turned into an “ass” but I am not really sure they understood where I was going with that “joke”.

Then it was off to an afternoon at the pool and more swimming lessons!

Today we started summer solstice week at Mom Camp. Our activities, projects, experiments and crafts are all related to the longest day of sunlight.

As part of our mid-summer celebration we built fairy houses today! On Friday (the solstice) we are going to leave them outside in hopes of catching a fairy!

The Princess designed her house to catch a princess fairy. Cinco wants to capture a “protector” fairy. I believe this to be his version of a knight. I am rather amazed that he’s going along with the fairy theme and is even enthusiastic about it. I was also required to build a fairy home and decided to go for a book fairy.

The Princess is certain she is going to catch a fairy. Cinco on the other-hand WANTS to believe he will catch one but is developing that sense of reality that its unlikely. Oh childhood–don’t leave so fast.

We made a bed for each fairy inspired by the mint tin bed craft from Disney. We made ours from gum packs instead of mint tins. As you can see, we made one from the Disney model and then branched out to a bunk bed and princess style four-poster bed.

We made a table and chairs as well.

The table top was recycled from the Rainbow Day CD crafts. The chairs are wooden nickels and wine corks. The kids added clay fruit to the table and The Princess let the fairies borrow the tray from her doll house tea set.

Of course we needed fairy dust jars so we glued a few beads together.

We also added a wire champagne chair made by The Captain.

Cinco also took two mini mint tins and made the lounge chair.

Cinco’s Protector fairy also needed a weapons cache, complete with a weapons cabinet.

Shield, a lance, spear, three swords

We are also planning to add a bow and arrow to the collection tomorrow. After all, you can only build so many weapons in a day– I am not Volcan. We also plan to create a fairy wand tomorrow as well.

These are pictures of our finished rooms:

I also owe Jillian and my mom a thank you for collecting materials!

After all this hard work, it was time for a break– well for mom at least! So I turned to my TV babysitter so I could take a shower! And the kids watched